Silken Prey

rally I’ve got to go to. You can reach me online with any more questions, and I can promise, you’ll get an answer. Let’s take two more questions. The lady in front, with the green blouse . . .”
    Five minutes later, led by a security man, with another one trailing behind, and his campaign manager walking beside him, Smalls headed for a side door. Lucas walked that way. Smalls waited at the door until he caught up, and then led the way into a back hallway.
    Lucas said, “We need to talk privately.”
    Smalls said, “It can’t be good news.”
    “No . . .”
    Smalls said, “Hang on,” and walked back to the people who’d come through the door behind them, spoke to one, who pointed down the hall. Smalls walked back to Lucas and said, “Come on. I’d like Ralph to come along.”
    Ralph Cox was his campaign manager. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man with curly black hair and overlong sideburns. Lucas nodded to Smalls and said, “That’s up to you,” and followed Smalls down the hall to an office. Smalls opened the door, and the three of them stepped inside.
    Lucas pushed the door shut and asked, “You had an affair with Helen Roman?”
    After a long pause, Smalls said, “Years ago.”
    “Did she think that it might lead to something permanent?” Lucas asked.
    “What’s going on? Is she the one who pushed the porn?”
    “Would she have reason to?” Lucas asked.
    Smalls wet his lower lip with his tongue, then said, “She was . . . disappointed when I broke it off. Pretty unhappy. I tried to make it up to her by overpaying her on the secretary’s job. There might have been some bad feeling at the time, but . . . that was years ago.”
    Cox asked, “What happened? Have you arrested her?”
    “She was murdered last night,” Lucas said.
    Smalls staggered, as though he’d been struck. He reached behind himself, found an office chair, and sank into it. “My God. Helen?”
    “She was struck in the head, the face, then shot with a small-caliber pistol,” Lucas said. “It looks at least superficially like a robbery, but I think . . . it’s related. I opened her computer and found notes from Tubbs. They’re cryptic—follow-ups on personal conversations. They don’t mention porn. They don’t even mention you. But Tubbs mentions that he’s got some kind of package, and that’s just a couple of days before somebody dropped the porn into your computer. Anyway, they had some kind of relationship. . . . I mean, maybe not sexual, but at least conversational. And it seemed like, conspiratorial.”
    Cox said to Smalls, “We’ve got to get on top of this, and
right now
. We’ve got to give it a direction. There are two possibilities—that Tubbs and the Democrats led her into it, for purely political reasons, and that she was killed by a coconspirator, or that she dumped the porn to ruin you, because she was bitter about the broken relationship. We’ve got to hit the Tubbs angle hard. We’ve got to steer it—”
    “Shut up for a minute. You can talk about that later,” Lucas said to him. Back to Smalls: “You said she was disappointed. How disappointed? You think she might have done the porn?”
    “I don’t know . . . maybe. Maybe she was a little resentful. I didn’t think so for a long time, but in the last couple of years, she’s been getting more and more distant.”
    “Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Cox said.
    Smalls: “Watch your mouth, Ralph. We’re in a church. If they heard you . . .”
    “Sorry. But for God’s sakes, Porter, if this comes out the wrong way, the TV people will dig up every woman you’ve ever slept with, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of them.”
    Lucas said, “Could we—”
    Cox jumped in again. “I’m gonna leave you guys to talk. I gotta call Marianne and get something going. We got no time for this, no time.”
    And he was out the door.
    “Who’s Marianne?” Lucas asked.
    “Media,” Smalls said. He pushed himself out of his chair. “I’ll tell you, Lucas, this is pretty much the end, for me. Ralph can do all the media twisting he wants, but it ain’t gonna work.”
    “There’s something else going on,” Lucas said. He hesitated, thinking that he might be about to make a mistake. “It’s possible that if Tubbs was working for the Grant campaign that he was killed to break the connection between the porn and the Grant campaign. And that the same people who killed him, killed Roman.”
    Smalls waved him